Spotify today announced an update to its iOS app that will bring more streamlined controls into its music browsing software, most notably allowing users to get a sneak preview of a song, album, or artist with a simple tap and hold on the screen.
The new feature, dubbed "Touch Preview", is aiming to get Spotify users to find their preferred music faster and with less hassle. The update also brings a swipe-left gesture into the app -- doing so on any song quickly saves it into Your Music for listening to later. The update to Spotify's iOS app will be rolling out later today.
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Spotify also announced last week that by the end of 2014, the service had accumulated 15 million subscribers and 60 million active users. Those number were up from 10 million subscribers and 40 million active users reported by the company in May 2014.
As users continues to shift to streaming services for their music consumption, Apple's efforts in the subscription streaming market are rumored to be seeing a new focus with an upcoming revamp of the Beats Music service, and its integration into iTunes, sometime in 2015. Apple most recently acquired media analytics company Semetric, likely integrating some of that company's Musicmetric tracking service into Beats and other aspects of iTunes.
Top Rated Comments
The best bands I've ever found generally had very few fans... it just seems to me that the probability of such amazing music ending up on a playlist made by someone else is slim to none, since someone making a playlist would be aiming to have more than 20 K people that listen to it.
But I'll bite - is there a playlist with Fear of Domination (3 K fans), Birthday Massacre (280 K), Blood Stain Child (10 K), and Insomnium (220 K) on it? Eluvetie? Korpiklaani? Turisas? Project Silence?
These are the artists that I never knew about before Spotify recommended them to me. There was no human touch involved - Spotify saw what I was listening to and made suggestions based on what people who liked similar things were also listening to. It was cold, calculated, and perfect. I feel like the odds of a human curated list having more than half of those bands just wouldn't happen.
Edit:
Wow. I have to pay? Really? I can't even look at your lists? No. F that.
Yea but that literally didn't happen until last year. It was about time but for me it was way too late. I had already moved on and by that time found other things I liked more in other services. It was definitely a big reason for trying out other services and had they had it from the get-go I might not have ever left. I don't know if this is still an issue with Spotify but back in the day it was also unclear if everything in their library was 320kbps for high quality playback. Beats (and MOG before it) has always guaranteed this. Rdio was also pretty unclear in this regard.
I'm thinking Apple will probably remove this limitation. Never really understood why Beats thought that was a good idea. But I've been paying the full $10 for streaming subscriptions for years and don't really see it as much of a cost compared to buying CDs or whatever. And I guess it also means more a contribution to the artists I'm listening to. This is actually pretty informative though it doesn't break down specifics on how much revenue a free listener generates compared to a premium listener http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/
There's a lot to like about Rdio, but last time I used the desktop app it was reliant on Flash, and it would eat CPU so much my fans were always running; has this changed?
I've tried Google Play All Access a few times, and am actually doing another trial right now. But the web player is unreliable, glitchy, and just not a great experience. Using the 3rd party app that wraps the web app makes for an even worse experience, and it appears to require installing Flash even though I configured HTML5 in Labs.
Looks like Beats also has a web player but no native app. How is the experience with this? Also, I wonder if Beats is going to become an Apple device exclusive in the near future -- this would make it less appealing in some respects, though wouldn't completely exclude it for me (after all, I still use iTunes with Mac, iPhone, Airplay). If the Beats iOS app ends up with tighter iOS integration than 3rd parties can achieve, that might be appealing, even though it would unfairly compete that way. Also, I wouldn't mind if Beats was integrated into iTunes and incorporated iTunes-like features (smart playlists, 5 star ratings, etc) -- I'm one of the few people who actually loves iTunes for music playback and appreciates it's strong feature set.
I also find Spotify has a good community in its shared playlists, though I haven't compared with other streaming services.
I love Spotify's preview feature in the desktop app, happy to see it in the iOS app.